Comment by duskwuff
1 day ago
MediaWiki syntax was its own odd duck. It used '''bold''' and ''italics'', and [https://example.com/ external links like this] - almost nothing else followed their lead.
1 day ago
MediaWiki syntax was its own odd duck. It used '''bold''' and ''italics'', and [https://example.com/ external links like this] - almost nothing else followed their lead.
And for a long time MediaWiki didn't have a proper parser for that markup, just a bunch of regexes that would transform it into HTML. I don't know if they have a proper parser now, but for reasons of backwards compatibility it must be lenient/forgiving, which means that converting all of Wikipedia to markdown is basically impossible now. So MediaWiki markup will stay with us for as long as there are MediaWiki wikis.
There's been some progress on that front:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid